Written by William M. Peaster, Bankless
Translated by Deng Tong, Golden Finance
Ethereum has always been moving forward.
In March 2024, the network introduced the Dencun upgrade. Dencun is a fusion of “Deneb” and “Cancun”, aimed at significantly reducing L2 transaction costs.
What’s next? Pectra is the next major upgrade for Ethereum, and it will be even more important than Dencun.
Pectra is scheduled to be released in the fourth quarter of 2024 or the first quarter of 2025, combining two previously planned upgrades: Prague (for the execution layer) and Electra (for the consensus layer). By merging these, Pectra aims to bring multiple ambitious improvements to Ethereum, making it more flexible and optimized than ever before. What does Pectra include?
Pectra is not just a small upgrade, it is full of updates.
Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) are proposed modifications to Ethereum. They ensure that network changes are transparently discussed and agreed upon, involving the community and core developers.
For the Pectra upgrade, there are currently plans to incorporate 9 standard EIPs and a meta-EIP consisting of an additional 11 EIPs.
These EIPs include enhancements to account abstraction, validator operations, and overall network performance. Some of the most notable additions include:
– EIP-2537 – Introducing precompiles for BLS12-381 curve operations to make BLS signature operations faster, cheaper, and improve accessibility and performance for Ethereum validators, while reducing gas costs.
– EIP-2935 – Implementing storing previous block hashes in special storage slots to improve efficiency and reliability in verifying Ethereum data before stateless execution.
– EIP-7002 – Allowing validators to trigger exits and partial withdrawals through their execution layer credentials, providing more flexible options for re-staking and staking pools.
– EIP-7251 – Increasing the maximum effective balance for Ethereum validators from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH, reducing the required number of validators and simplifying the network’s computational load.
– EIP-7594 – Introducing Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS) to further optimize L2, enhance transaction processing, and scalability.
– EIP-7702 – Adding a new transaction type that allows setting EOA (Externally Owned Account) code during a transaction, enabling regular wallets to temporarily function as smart contract wallets to improve user experience.
– EIP-7692 – A meta-EIP composed of 11 EIPs aimed at enhancing the Ethereum Virtual Machine Object Format (EOF) to improve contract deployment and execution efficiency.
With these new improvements, Ethereum will be able to better meet the growing adoption, integrate with other networks, and introduce new features to remain at the forefront of on-chain innovation. What will happen after Pectra?
While nothing is set in stone yet, the Ethereum community is eyeing the implementation of Verkle trees in the Osaka upgrade after Pectra.
“I’m really looking forward to Verkle trees,” Vitalik said earlier this year. “They will enable stateless validator clients, allowing staking nodes to run on almost zero disk space and sync almost instantly – a better standalone staking user experience.”
That being said, the next upgrades for Ethereum will significantly enhance the chain’s usability for users and developers. Ethereum cannot be built in a day, but steady progress in building towards the future of Ethereum is the way forward.